New York and Long Island Coignet Stone Company Building, Office building in Gowanus, Brooklyn, United States
The New York and Long Island Coignet Stone Company Building is an office building in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, sitting at the corner of Third Street and Third Avenue with a cast-stone facade decorated with urns, Ionic columns, and small porticos. The structure was built using a technique called Beton Coignet, an early form of concrete that was largely unfamiliar to American builders at the time.
The building went up in 1873 as a way to introduce Beton Coignet technology to an American market that had little experience with concrete construction. Over the decades it survived urban changes around Gowanus and was eventually recognized as a New York City Landmark.
The facade still shows cast-stone urns and Ionic columns that were placed there to convince architects and builders of the material's potential. Walking past today, you can read the building as a kind of open catalog of what the new technique could do.
The building stands at the corner of Third Street and Third Avenue in Gowanus, an easy walk from the Carroll Street subway station. It sits right next to a large grocery store on Third Avenue, which makes it straightforward to spot when coming from either direction.
The building was designed to function as both a working office and a hands-on showroom, so that anyone curious about the new concrete method could examine the walls and details up close. This made it one of the earliest examples in America of a building used as its own advertisement.
The community of curious travelers
AroundUs brings together thousands of curated places, local tips, and hidden gems, enriched daily by 60,000 contributors worldwide.
